Читать книгу Will there be Donuts?: Start a business revolution one meeting at a time - David Pearl - Страница 33

I have come to realize that diaries are like houses. It is easy to fill them both with unwanted clutter.

In 2008 the Pearls decided to spend a couple of years living in Italy. When we rented out our house in London we put half the furniture in storage and took the rest with us to Piedmont. On our return we had only 50 percent of our original furniture and the house felt—absolutely fine! Or to put it another way, we had been living with twice as much stuff as we needed but hadn’t noticed because we had got so used to all the clutter around us, we’d stopped seeing it. So, now take a look at your diary and all the meetings in it. Which half needs to go into storage? There will be two kinds of meetings cluttering up your day: Standing meetings and Ad Hoc ones.

Standing meetings are the regular ones which are fixed (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly) at the beginning of the year and/or project. They are like the furniture, fixtures, and fittings. You don’t necessarily know who gave them to you or why they are there, but they have been around so long you have ceased to notice them; they have become the background to your life. The rest are Ad Hoc meetings. They appear unexpectedly in response to a situation, problem or request. I think of these as impulse buys that you see at the weekend and “must have,” or mail—including junk mail—that arrives in your letterbox clamoring for your attention.

The rules for de-cluttering a house or diary are very similar. You need a brutal cull of the unwanted contents you have accumulated and a severely selective, No Junk, entry policy to prevent any new garbage crossing the threshold.